Perfect Pictures With Plug-Ins
Many image editors, including Photoshop Elements, Jasc Paint Shop Pro, and Ulead PhotoImpact, work with hundreds of standard Adobe plug-in filters. When you see eye-poppingly clever digital effects in photos, they probably were made with plug-ins. Here are seven of the best.
Xenofex 2 delivers more than a dozen of the most outrageous digital effects you'll ever see. Add realistic lighting effects, populate a clear blue sky with clouds, or place your scene inside a television screen. $129
LensDoc can correct problems that your camera lens causes. If your photos suffer from barrel distortion or pin-cushioning, LensDoc can straighten the warped lines. $98
Focus Magic has just one mission in life: to sharpen your pictures. It's tuned to remove unwanted blur from your pictures without merely adding contrast to edges in your scene. This is the approach of traditional tools like Photoshop's Unsharp Mask. $45
Pxl SmartScale lets you save images at sizes much larger than their original dimensions. Thanks to some fancy mathematics, you can print pictures at otherwise off-limits sizes. $200
Puzzle Pro turns digital photos into jigsaw puzzles-on screen or for real. Puzzle Pro can save each puzzle piece as a separate file, so you can even create a table-top version of the puzzle if you want. $50
RedEyePro goes beyond the normal red-eye removal function found in most image editors. It preserves glints and reflections while removing the evil red glow. It can even remove the corresponding green-eye effect that plagues photographs of some animals. $39
AutoEye 2.0 is a more effective tool than the red-eye removal filters of all the big applications except Paint Shop Pro. It restores lost color, recaptures detail, corrects brightness, and eliminates moiré patterns. $129
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